I am a historian of the diverse peoples and environments of the U.S. West and the broader Pacific World prior to the 20th century.
My first book, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (2012), explores the impact of different kinds of borders on the history of the greater Puget Sound/Fraser River salmon fishery. Prior to Euro-American conquest, Native peoples in what later became northwestern Washington State and southwestern British Columbia came to hold or “own” valuable salmon fishing sites and developed elaborate social customs surrounding the act of fishing. Over time, this resulted in a border system of restricted access rights that regulated the total salmon catch. The Anglo-American border of 1846, in contrast, facilitated the emergence of a chaotic, competitive industrial salmon fishery wracked by class, ethnic, and international tensions. Conflicts between fishermen of different nationalities and ethnicities erupted regularly and the proximity of the forty-ninth parallel soon became critical to the tenor of regional class relations and international negotiations on salmon conservation. Legitimate fishermen and “fish pirates” broke cannery contracts, stole salmon, and slipped across the border in pursuit of higher prices or to elude arrest. These border crossings impeded progress on transnational conservation policies and contributed to the overfishing and wastefulness that plagued this industry well into the twentieth century. A transnational view of this shared fishery is thus essential for understanding the region’s contemporary Pacific salmon crisis.
The Nature of Borders was awarded the American Historical Association’s Albert B. Corey Prize (best book on Canadian-American relations), the Western History Association’s Hal K. Rothman Award (best book in western environmental history), and the North American Society for Oceanic History’s John Lyman Award (best book in maritime science and technology).
Although I initially conceived of my first book as a study of the neglected Canada-U.S. border, I quickly realized that it was also reflective of the global turn in U.S. history. Workers, capital, commodities, and salmon migration routes all firmly linked the western Canada-U.S. borderlands to the Pacific, particularly Hawai’i. Fastening on these connections, the rise of scholarly interest in the greater “Pacific World,” and my own background in Asian Studies, I initiated a study of the environmental and social histories of nineteenth-century Pacific whaling.
In the process of conducting the above research, I discovered a remarkable Kingdom of Hawai’i Maritime Court case that is now the focus of my second monograph. I am using this fascinating trial to interrogate the intersections of race, sexuality, empire, and power in the nineteenth-century American whaling industry in the Pacific.
At the UO, I teach courses on Native American history, the history of the U.S. West, and U.S. environmental history. I also consider myself to be a borderlands historian. I am currently accepting MA and PhD students in these fields.
A native of Portland, Oregon, I taught for over a decade at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon prior to joining the faculty at UO. I completed my MA and PhD in U.S. history at UCLA and received a BA in Asian Studies from Pomona College in Claremont, California.